The Response of the Mainstream Parties

Abstract

The rise of the National Front took all of the mainstream French political parties by surprise. After some ten years as a marginal political force, its initial electoral successes, in Dreux in 1983 and in the European elections of the following year, were generally explained away as a temporary fever in the French body-politic. In this view, Le Pen’s emergence from relative obscurity was likened to similar eruptions in the past, like Boulangisme in the nineteenth century or more recently Poujadisme, where the extreme Right had surged forward, only to disappear from the scene, almost as quickly as they had come. The National Front was not treated seriously. Many on the Right believed that its success was solely linked to proportional voting (even the Municipal elections contained an element of proportional representation), and that the Front would quickly wither once confronted by the two-ballot majority voting system.